Choosing a Business Profile category, and what the category controls

It is tempting to treat your Business Profile category as a keyword decision. It is closer to a permission. The category decides which fields your profile has, which features Google offers you, and in one documented case whether you may change your own opening hours. Google does not say that in its help pages, but it proves it in its API, whose published list of rejection reasons includes one that says a category cannot edit business hours.

The rejection reason that gives the game away

Google’s v4 API publishes an enum of standardized rejection reasons, introduced as:

Represents standardized policy violations. New values may be added in the future. Clients should be prepared to handle unknown values.

One of those values is ILLEGAL_BUSINESS_HOURS_EDIT, and its description is a single sentence: “Your business category can’t edit business hours.” Not you, not your account, not your profile: your category. Somewhere in Google’s model there is a category that owns a place but may not say when it opens. That one sentence settles whether “the category is just a label for search” is an adequate mental model. The rest of the list, and what each value means for a refused reply, is in the published rejection reasons.

Three fields on Google’s API that the category decides

The Business Information API defines a category as a type, not a tag: “A category describing what this business is (not what it does).” Two of its four fields are read-only lists Google fills in from the category:

Field	Google’s description
serviceTypes[]	“Output only. A list of all the service types that are available for this business category.”
moreHoursTypes[]	“Output only. More hours types that are available for this business category.”

Output only is the API’s way of saying you do not choose them. The second closes the loop on hours: extra opening times for takeaway, a drive through or a pickup counter are not free-form, and the MoreHours object says “Required. Type of hours. Clients should call {#link businessCategories:BatchGet} to get supported hours types for categories of their locations.” You ask the category what kinds of hours it may have.

The third case is a field turning from required to optional. On the Location resource, the profile description is documented as “This field is required for all categories except lodging categories (e.g. hotels, motels, inns).”

What Google says about choosing the primary one

The help page is direct: “Select a primary category that best describes your business.” Specificity is the whole instruction, and the guidelines page gives the best test of it:

Select categories that complete the statement: “This business IS a” rather than “this business HAS a.” The goal is to describe your business holistically rather than a list of all the services it offers, products it sells, or amenities it features.

Google expands your choice upwards for you, so climbing the tree yourself is wasted effort:

For instance, when you select a specific category like “Golf Resort”, Google implicitly includes more general categories like “Resort Hotel”, “Hotel”, and “Golf Course.”

You cannot invent one: “If the specific category you want isn’t available, select a general category that describes your business. You can’t create your own category.” Chains get a consistency rule too, “All locations of a business must share the one category that best represents the business.” The choice is a ranking input by Google’s own account, “The categories you select affect your local ranking on Google”, next to the flat statement that “There’s no way to request or pay for a better local ranking on Google.”

How many additional categories

Google publishes a number, on the profile editing page rather than the category page: “You can select up to 9 more categories.” With the primary one, that is ten in all. The same page gives the ordering: “If you select several categories, the category in the first field will be your primary category.”

The number is a ceiling, not a target, and Google spends more words arguing against filling it than defining it. Additional categories are for real departments: “To inform your customers about special departments or services, select additional categories. Do not select a category for every product or service.” The guidelines repeat it, “Use as few categories as possible to describe your overall core business from the provided list.”, then ban the obvious abuse, “Do not use categories solely as keywords or to describe features of your business.”

The features that arrive with the category

Google states the principle once, “Based on your business category, you might notice special features available for your Business Profile”, then gives examples:

Category	What it unlocks, in Google’s words
Hotels	“Can show class ratings and list the amenities it offers.”
Restaurants	“Can add links for online orders, reservations, and menus. They can also add menu items directly.”
Health and beauty	“Can add a booking button to their profiles and update their list of services.”

Three other help pages say the same. The services editor: “Businesses in certain categories, like service businesses, might have the option to showcase their offerings directly on their Business Profile.” Waitlists: “This feature is only available for restaurant businesses.” Attributes: “Some attributes can only be changed in certain locations, countries, or business categories.”

Changing it later

You can. Primary and additional categories are both editable from Edit profile, and Google reviews the change like any other: “We review your changes before we update them live on your profile.” Two costs are published. One is verification, “If you add or edit an existing category, you might be asked to verify your business again.” The other is that a category change disqualifies a name change from being handled as a rebrand, which the guidelines allow only “if you make a minor name change, in which the proper nouns and services described in the business name remain unchanged and the business category remains unchanged.”

Via the API it is all or nothing: “During updates, both fields must be set. Clients are prohibited from individually updating the primary or additional categories using the update mask.”

The number we are not going to give you

This page prints no full category list and no count, because Google publishes no total and its own API explains why a single global number would be wrong. The categories.list method requires a country and a language: “Required. The ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country code.” and “Required. The BCP 47 code of language.” What you can choose from depends on where you are and which language you asked in, and it arrives a page at a time, “Optional. How many categories to fetch per page. Default is 100, minimum is 1, and maximum page size is 100.” Any scraped list is one country, one language, one day. We have not enumerated it ourselves and we are not going to assert a figure we did not count.

The short version

Pick the most specific category that finishes the sentence “This business IS a”, let Google infer the general ones, and add additional categories only for real departments, up to the nine Google allows. Then read what the category gave you and took away: which extra hours types exist, whether a description is required, whether you get a booking button or a services editor. And if an hours edit comes back refused, the API has a sentence for that, and it is about your category rather than about you. For the part of a profile the category does not gate, see replying to a negative review.